Finale Forum

Working on a piece of music for organ. The second half of the piece uses all three staves (right hand, left hand, pedal for those unfamiliar with organ notation), but the first half is only right hand and left hand, so I'd like to hide the pedal staff for the first couple of pages. However, when I select the staff and try the "Hide Empty Staves" button, nothing happens. I've changed the Organ group attributes to "When Hiding Empty Staves: Hide Normally," and I've set the pedal staff attributes to "Allow hiding when empty," but hide empty staves still has no effect at all. I've googled around and couldn't find any solution other than these two.

Any thoughts?

Make sure that the staff is really empty when inactive (no "real" rests).

That doesn't seem to be the problem; even if I make a brand new experimental document, put a few notes in the LH and RH staves, and put nothing in the pedal part, it still doesn't work.

I then tried adding another staff (a soprano voice) to my experimental document, and it behaved as it should when I tried to hide it, so it seems like there's some kind of issue with the group attributes. But the group is set to "hide normally," so I don't know what the problem could actually be.

You could submit the file here (or an excerpt).

Probably the organ is set up as a group that doesn't allow hiding staves. That would be typical for keyboard instruments.

You'll need to select the group and edit, make sure the instrument is set to "All Staves" and then "Hide Normally". I just tried it and it works.

Bill

Attaching the document to this message.

Bill: You mean in the "group attributes"? As I said in my first post, I did try setting the group attributes to "hide normally" when hiding empty staves. It changed nothing.

EDIT-- Submitted my post before I saw you edited yours with more info. What do you mean by "instrument is set to 'All Staves'"? Maybe I've missed that.

EDIT 2-- Found it! That was indeed the problem! Thanks so much!

Edit 3-- I'm deleting the document from the post for security's sake.

michelp wrote:Make sure that the staff is really empty when inactive (no "real" rests).

Real rests no longer interfere with hiding empty staves--even if they contain fermatas (a nice feature). I think this change for the better occurred when "Optimize" was replaced by "Hide empty staves."

You are correct, motet (verified in 2011, 2012, 2014d, 2014.5, 25.5 Mac). Since the appearance of "Hide Empty Staves" in the Staff menu.
Old habits have a tendency to persist. Thanks for the reminder.

Easiest, simplest and reliable way for me to hide empty staves from group - delete group, hide unnecessary staves and create group again. This way work for me without complaints.

I had the same problem yesterday. And yes, "all staves" is the solution. (Thank you, Forum!) However, I wanted to clarify one detail that wasn't obvious. You click on the group name and right-click to get to Group Attributes. (That part was clear.) But then, when you get to the Group Attributes window, there is a pull down menu in the upper left corner. There are two options: "Organ" and "Organ (all staves)." You want the second one.

There's also a staff style called "Force Hide Staff (Collapse)" that you could try on the organ staff.